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eMOLT Update 2023-09-15
This week’s update is a short one. Earlier this week, a grad school
colleague of mine drowned doing a fish survey out west. She was 31 and
had two young kids. These kind of events are a sobering reminder that
working on the water comes with certain risks. Please do what you can to
keep yourselves safe, and give your loved ones an extra hug before you
head out.
Hurricane Lee is now north of Bermuda and will make landfall
somewhere along the Maine / Canada border, with impacts throughout
coastal New England.

We’re going into the storm down one buoy in Southern New England.
Yesterday, NERACOOS
announced that their Buzzards Bay buoy had been struck by a passing
vessel last Sunday and would be out of the water for repairs until
further notice.
Low DO areas persisted throughout Cape Cod Bay this week. A severely
low reading between Ellisville and Manomet may be indicative of a failed
logger rather than extreme hypoxia. We will work with the fishermen who
was assigned that logger to iron things out. Earlier in the week, The
Cape Cod Times published
an article on this industry-based monitoring effort.

Other Dissolved Oxygen News
In news from the north, the DO loggers we’ve deployed with realtime
systems in the Gulf of Maine continue to produce readings in the normal
range.
Earlier this week, George spoke with some colleagues at WHOI about
concern over the potential for hypoxic conditions forming south of Long
Island. Glen Gawarkiewicz mentioned that the water column stratification
in that area has been particularly strong this summer, with fresher,
more buoyant, fresher surface water acting almost like a lid to prevent
water column mixing. eMOLT temperature profiles from the summer season
(such as the August plots below) show this stratification, particularly
offshore. Unfortunately, as of now, we don’t have a great way to deploy
dissolved oxygen loggers on mobile gear.

Forecasts
NECOFS Bottom Temperature Forecast


Doppio Bottom Temperature Forecast

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Tracy Pugh at Mass DMF for flagging the potentially
problematic reading on one of our loggers this week.
Announcements
The next meeting
of the New England Fisheries Management Council will be September
25-28 in Plymouth, MA.
Saildrone is operating two Uncrewed Surface Vessels in the
eastern third of the Gulf of Maine to collect high resolution
bathymetric data from August 28 - October 18. Coordinates by date and
contact information can be found here
Stay safe this weekend, George and JiM
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